Companies winning new sales, gaining the greatest market share and creating the most value for customers all share a common trait: they deliberately turn blue-collar knowledge into gold.
The depth and extent of these workers’ knowledge has the potential to completely transform company brands, reputations and customer experiences. Capitalizing on the years of knowledge and experience can lead to entirely new approaches to selling, manufacturing, delivering services and creating lifetime value.
Consider how General Electric continues to lead with innovation in its core markets. It has discovered how to take the essence of its commitment to Six Sigma, which is their Voice of the Customer Programs, and combine it with the insight and intelligence of its production teams. The result continues to be market-leading products and profitable services that keep GE in the forefront of the industries in which they compete. In essence, it has found an entirely new way to innovate by capitalizing on blue-collar knowledge.
There are also companies tackling the quoting, pricing and configure-to-order problems slowing down their sales by capitalizing knowledge. They see the expertise of their production teams as a catalyst of greater competitive strength.
From manufacturers of drill equipment that are streamlining their quoting, pricing and product configuration to fight off Chinese competitors to manufacturers of emergency vehicles that need to produce quotes that lead to only profitable build-to-order configurations being built, each share a common thread. Each has redefined their selling strategies and strengthened them with the insights gained from blue-collar manufacturing, production, services and support teams. These teams are transforming companies with their deep product and process expertise.
The following ten steps are the path many have followed to turn blue-collar knowledge into gold.
Top Ten Lessons Learned
1. Creating common goals that rely on collaboration and reward it are key. Let’s get real about information. It’s the most potent political asset there is. Because of this, making people and processes change is very difficult. Overcoming this challenge needs to start with shared goals that are only attainable through collaboration. Setting the goal of increasing your sales team’s quoting accuracy by 50% can quickly translate into new sales and customers. It requires production and manufacturing to provide greater input than ever before. When companies have created these shared goals and hold teams accountable for working with each other, greater information-sharing happens. Common goals are critically important for transforming blue-collar knowledge into goals.
2. Defining performance targets or metrics and measuring them to celebrate wins is the first step to making knowledge-sharing stick. Setting up the manufacturing teams to win for sharing their experience, insights and intelligence is a must-do. Bringing blue-collar workers to the strategy table can save you days, even weeks, of trial-and-error in redesigning your quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies. When you do this, set reasonable, shared measures of performance that apply across sales, marketing, product management, manufacturing and service. An excellent set of metrics include measuring the accuracy of quotes, conversion of quotes to orders and quoting accuracy.
3. Create a benchmark based on the performance targets or metrics to measure process improvement in quoting, pricing and product configuration. Often when companies have successfully brought manufacturing and blue-collar knowledge to the table, they see an increase in process accuracy and speed. Each step in a process is done faster. There is not the lag time waiting for information anymore. It’s because everyone that the process relies on to get done now owns it. Doing knowledge-sharing right will nurture and create ownership—and this is one of the greatest catalysts of performance gains any company can achieve.
4. Piloting quoting, pricing or product-configuration strategies for thirty days will tell you how well knowledge-sharing is working. This is the most valuable activity of all, because it provides proof to those that felt they risked so much by sharing their knowledge to make a company more competitive. Make sure everyone who is sharing knowledge has ownership of the pilot too; share ownership during this stage. Companies that do see change to quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies last.
5. Owning the good and bad about the pilot makes knowledge-sharing more trusted. Pilots are never perfect. They are best used to find areas for further improvement in each of these strategic areas of a company. Be sure to share the good and the bad, because a pilot is the start of a cycle of continual improvement. Go to the blue-collar workers and ask them how it can be improved, go to each team involved and seek input. Build credibility by telling the truth, even if it means the pilot is only successful on a few metrics.
6. Using the lessons learned from the pilot, change your quoting, pricing or product-configuration strategy. This is often the most gratifying step for the blue-collar and manufacturing team members who contributed their knowledge and insight. They get to see positive, permanent change in how their companies operate. Make a point of creating a storyline of how manufacturing, service, support—in short the entire team—were responsible for the improvements in quoting, pricing and product-configuration performance. Tell the story of how they changed the company for the better at company events and make it part of who your company is.
7. Recognizing, rewarding and showing the sales increases due to knowledge-sharing are key to changing your company’s culture. The payoff of sharing knowledge needs to be made very clear. Reward and recognize how blue-collar workers contributed so much to changing how your company sells, services and keeps customers. Take the first step to creating a culture that values collaboration. By doing this, you will break down the barriers between departments and set your teams up to focus on what really matters—beating the competition.
8. Choose competitors to make examples of and focus on the teams who shared knowledge on beating them. With your quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies stronger from the expertise shared, choose competitors to target. Bring the entire team into a mindset of your company beating a competitor on quoting accuracy, pricing, product configuration and most important of all, customer experience. This has a tremendous galvanizing force on the diverse groups in your company. Be sure to report back monthly on how you are doing against competitors, and if you took deals away from them—fantastic! This is the type of focus that brings teams together.
9. Making the performance of quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies very visible all the time is a great motivator. Providing the ongoing results of these strategies not only gives everyone who contributed more ownership, they will be constantly looking for ways to improve the process. It also shows where there is room for improvement. Be sure to share results with each member of the team so they can see how their contributions made a difference. Great ideas come out of doing this, as often those on the production line will see how a product configuration could be made more efficiently for example. Open up the creativity of your teams by doing this.
10. Share the profit gains companywide from the improved quoting, pricing and product-configuration strategies. Be sure to mention when everyone gets a quarterly or yearly bonus that the revised processes made successful from knowledge-sharing contributed to profits and growth. Set this as one of the goals from the outset and recognize those contributors who gave the most time, expertise and insight.
Bottom line: The greatest competitive weapon any company has is the knowledge its workers have gained over years, and in some cases, decades of service. Unleashing that knowledge can make all the difference in winning new customers and keeping existing ones.
photo: http://www.strokenetwork.net/images/pot.jpg
Country – Louis Columbus
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